Most of us should have seen the 50th Anniversary Special by now. There's been a lot of love for it and in my opinion it was just about perfect. Everything that they could have done well, they did. Just as it wouldn't have been possible to bring back Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee, I don't think bringing back any of the older Doctors would have made much sense - except of course, in context, bringing back the one they did was rather wonderful! But to have had them all there throughout the adventure would have been an awful mess.



Which leads us on to Christopher Eccleston. I heard that they asked him to come back, but that he said no. Fair enough. It left us with Mr Regret and Mr Forget, Smith and Tennant, plus a new Doctor in the shape of John Hurt.

If Eccleston had decided to come back, we'd have been denied an extra Doctor, which I found pretty damn exciting. It made for a cracking cliffhanger at the end of The Name of The Doctor and it added the magnificent John Hurt to the canon of Doctors Who. Even with his guilt and angst, Eccleston felt too fresh-faced and energetic in Rose to have been the convincing, worn-down, battle-scared War Doctor.

So perhaps he could have appeared, like Smith and Tennant, as one of the 'Future' Doctors. This would have lead to four Doctors running around, causing mischief. In my view, the scenes with Tennant, Hurt and Smith were wonderful. Very nicely balanced. To have added the 9th Doctor in to this would have made a bit of a mess. What's more, the other two both know what happened to Rose, so they would have needed to deal with that as well. The back story would have become a bit too heavy.

In my opinion, things worked out for the best.

But what do you think?